Il Sette Bello

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Sunday, February 01, 2015

Podcast fans, we know you're mourning the end of Serial season 1. Why not try this new podcast (co-produced by moi and a small team of talented journalists)? It involves science, big data, technology and gripping tales. Some great music too! It's called Wild Ducks. Let me know what you think!

Tuesday, July 08, 2014

This article originally ran in a October, 24, 2007 article
in Times Online, back when I was a columnist there. Now that it's lost
behind a firewall I've resurrected the original, unedited version here.

By Bernhard Warner

By G8 standards, Italy is a strange country
to define. To put it simply, it is a nation of octogenarian lawmakers elected
by slightly younger voters, 70-year-old pensioners. Everyone else is
inconsequential.

The prime minister Romano Prodi is a spry 68,
knocking off 71-year-old Silvio Berlusconi in last year’s election. President
Giorgio Napolitano, 82, has six more years left on his term; his predecessor
was 86 when he called it quits. In the unlikely event Italy declares war, the
decision will come from a head of state that was a month shy of 20 when the
Germans surrendered in World War II.

This creaky
perspective is a necessary introduction to any discussion about Italian
politics with outsiders, I find. If the Italian government seems unable to
adapt to the modern world, the explanation is quite simple. Your country would
operate like this too if your grandparents were in charge.

Recently,
Italian lawmakers once again took aim at modern life, introducing an incredibly
broad law that would effectively require all bloggers, and even users of social
networks, to register with the state. Even a harmless blog about a favourite
football squad or a teenager grousing about life’s unfairness would be subject
to government oversight, and even taxation -- even if it’s not a commercial web
site.

I understand
the lack of alarm in their tone. We’ve been down this road countless times.
Panicky government officials, whether they are in Harare, Beijing or Rome (yes,
this is the second time it’s been proposed here), pronounce a brand new muzzle
for the internet, and clever netizens simply find a way around it. Even that
agitated teen probably has a foolproof way of masking his IP address. And
besides, it could be easily argued that a Blogger or Typepad blog is hosted on
a server well outside the bel paese,
making a stupid law virtually unenforceable. And finally this is Italy, a place
where plumbers and captains of industry alike are serial tax evaders. Don’t
sweat it, amico. Enjoy the sunshine, vino rosso and tagliatelle.

Maybe it is
because of all these obvious points that the draft law is already going through
some revisions. If it is ratified – and at the moment it looks frighteningly
likely – the Ministry of Communications would decide who must register with the
state.

This is
hardly comforting. The intent of this draft law, as it was written when it
breezed through the Council of Ministers on Oct. 12, would be to gag bloggers,
who, for those in power, have become a particularly problematic force of late.
They are lead by the crusading (some say “populist”) Beppe Grillo, a
comedian-turned-activist-turned-blogger. Grillo is one of the best-read
commentators on Italian life, both in and, thanks to his English-language blog
(http://www.beppegrillo.it/english.php),
outside of the country. He agitates on behalf of the disenfranchised (code for:
Italian youth), campaigning for more transparent government and business.

Grillo
believes the law is directed at him. Whether it is or not doesn’t really
matter. The law’s impact would turn all bloggers in Italy into potential
outlaws. This could be great for their traffic, I realise, but hell on the
business aspirations of an Italian web startup, not to mention any tech company
that wants to sell its blog publishing software in Italy, or open a social
network here. In addition to driving out potential tech jobs, the stifling of
free speech also can have a dramatic chilling effect on all forms of free
expression, the arts and scholarship.

I am
thinking specifically here of my students. I teach an introductory journalism
course at John Cabot University in Rome. My students cover the city and
university affairs in an online blog-style newspaper called “The MatthewOnline”. If
this law is to pass, we could not simply move the blog to an offshore server.
We’d be one of the few who would be forced to abide by this crazy law.

Each
semester, I’d have to get 20 or so students registered with the Ministry of
Communications, a bureaucratic nightmare that no doubt would take more than a
semester to complete, and would turn a generation of idealistic journalists
away from the field forever, perhaps into something more rewarding like the
assault rifle lobby. So, instead of teaching aspiring journalists about news
reporting by having them do some actual news reporting, we could spend three
months doing lead-writing exercises from a textbook.

And so I appeal
to Italy’s Communications Minister, Paolo Gentiloni, a former journalist
himself, and Ricardo Franco Levi, the lawmaker
who conceived of this wrong-headed bill. Is silencing the youth of this country
really the best solution to dealing with a few squeaky wheels?

Thursday, July 03, 2014

This article first appeared in ContemporArt in January, 2013, in Italian. I have dug up the original draft, in English, and reposted it here following my interview with Rafman in November, 2012. I'm posting it here after getting a note that his latest exhibition opened at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Hoping it comes to Rome, too!

It may be one of the most ambitious corporate projects of the Internet era: mapping the entire planet street-by-street, alley-by-alley. This has been the goal at Google since 2007 when it launched Google Street View for select cities in the United States. Today, a fleet of Street View cars equipped with a boom-like camera circle the globe capturing a 360-degree street-level perspective of even the streets you’d never dare venture down. Their exploration will feed one of the most heavily used mobile apps on the planet: Google Maps. When the Street View drivers are finished circumnavigating the world, they will start all over again, driving around the entire planet, photographing as they go, street-by-street, alley-by-alley.

It’s debatable whether Google will ever make a dime off such a time-consuming venture. No matter. It’s become a public good -- it keeps us from getting lost. It is also the inspiration for one of the digital art world’s best-traveled exhibitions in recent years: Jon Rafman’s “9-Eyes,” which rolled into Rome’s MACRO Testaccio this Fall after an extended stint at London’s Saatchi Gallery.

To be sure, Rafman’s 9-Eyes is as determined an effort as Google Street View. Fascinated by the idea Google would attempt to photograph and index every shop, house, and apartment block on the planet (and all the characters who live on the street below), Rafman started his own exploration, retracing their route. Clicking through the world of Street View for hours and days on end, he went in search of the fascinating amid mundane shots of street life.

What he found has startled gallery-goers for more than two years. One screen-grab image (pictured above) he pulled from Street View shows a toddler who was abandoned outside a Gucci shop in Taipei crawling with determination and purpose, destination unknown. Another is a scene of sheer panic: neighbors rushing to the scene of a fire in a residential neighborhood in St. Catherine, Ontario. And then there is the oddly poignant,, like one shot that would move even the most hard-to-impress Roman: a completely desolate Altare della Patria save for a lone gladiator holding his helmet as if pondering his next battle.

ContemporArt spoke to the 30-year-old Rafman last month via Skype to discuss his inspiration behind the project and what he thought of the future of digital art. He was back in his hometown, Montreal. For a change. “I lived in Rome all summer. I did at residency at the MACRO, and became friends with the curators. That’s how 9-Eyes came to Rome. It was a last-minute addition,” he explained.

There are only a few of Rafman’s prints at the MACRO. Luckily for those of us in Italy, they are many of the ones that have been discussed, debated and dissected on Internet discussion forums. The reception to 9 Eyes has been as intense on Reddit, the popular online discussion forum favored by the Net’s cognoscenti, as it has in leading art publications and in down-market London tabloids who were obsessed with the voyeuristic element of it. “The tabloids treated the exhibition more like a sensational human interest story, while the more sophisticated publications treated it on a much more enlightened level,” he said, touching on the implications of what this means for the future of digital as an art form.

Rafman seemed genuinely impressed by the level of discourse from all sides. “I didn’t realize how much of a nerve this was to going to hit when I started the project. I knew, to myself, that there was something really special here, but I do have to say I’m surprised by the level of interest, and how varied it’s been.”

Rafman got the idea for 9 Eyes in 2008 at the height of his interest in the Net.art movement that had him previously exploring, for example, some of the more fetishistic parts of Second Life, a virtual world where users adopt super-sexual avatars and fantastic digital personae to represent themselves. “It was almost a space that was more real than the real world because it exhibited its own artificiality,” he said of the experience there.

Second Life may be passé today, but the compulsive “Internet surf culture” that dominated this world is alive and well in what Rafman tried to achieve with 9 Eyes -- a reference to the 9 camera lenses mounted to the top of the Google Street View car.

“And it’s snowballed from there,” he said.“2008, that’s a long time in Internet years.”

9 Eyes has been now shown across Europe, North America and Asia. It’s turned Rafman into a global traveler, enabling him to see in person the same streets of far-away cities that he had first explored from his desk in Google Street View. This is something truly unique to our shrunken Web 2.0 world, he says. “When you go to a place for the first time after you’ve already visited it, it creates a completely different aura to that place.”

Another unique aspect of his work is the thorny issue of ownership. Technically, the images are all Google’s. Rafman just curates the best pieces. Google, he says, has kept its distance from 9 Eyes. The search engine giant does not try to put the brakes on Rafman’s ever evolving artistic treatment of its intellectual property. Rafman, for his part, says he is just paying homage to Google’s adventurous spirit and to the art it creates every day for Street View.

“Never before in human history has anyone tried to photograph the entire world from a human experience,” Rafman remarks. “Not only once, but continuously. That is still inconceivable to me. That is the inspiration for me, the fact that it is an activity that is practically endless. Technically, 9 Eyes will never end.”

Monday, May 27, 2013

This article originally ran in a September, 20, 2006 article
in Times Online, back when I was a columnist there. Now that it's lost
behind a firewall I've resurrected the original, unedited version here.

By Bernhard Warner

Was it naïve to think a populist movement galvanised
by a call of downloads for all! could
sweep into political power? This rueful question is on the minds of many young
Swedes this week after national elections.

The youth-dominated Piracy Party, founded
earlier this year in Sweden before spreading to 16 other countries including
Britain, failed in its first trip to the polls on Sunday. A party founded on
three basic principles – to reform commercial copyright, eradicate meddlesome
patent laws and stop the surveillance of file-sharers – proved to be less popular
with the voters than tax cuts and job growth, as promised by the victorious
right-leaning Moderate Party.

While the official tally was still unavailable
as of press time, the Piracy Party was expected to amass in the area of one
percent of the popular vote. They had been hoping for four percent (or roughly
300,000 votes), a tally required to earn seats in Parliament and begin the
arduous task of convincing lawmakers of the need to rewrite legislation
governing copyright and patents and to strengthen privacy protections for all
netizens.

The BitTorrent generation’s most organised
push yet for copyright reform, certainly the net’s most popular rallying cry,
will now be stalled for at least two more years – until after the 2009 European
Parliamentary elections, an election the Piracy Party has in its sights.

“Obviously, we’re not happy we didn’t get
more of the vote,” Balder Lingegard, a university
student from Gothenburg who serves as the Pirate Party secretary and ran for an
MP seat, told me this week after a full day of classes. “But if you think what we’ve accomplished for an
organisation with such financial limitations, the mood is still high.”

When we spoke last week, on the eve of the
elections, he was upbeat and a bit anxious. The early poll results showed promise,
and it dawned on him that if successful, the 22-year-old would have to figure
out a way to juggle his quantum physics classes with his Parliamentary
obligations. Kids these days!

But instead, as Mr. Lingegard dolefully
noted this week, it’s back to the books. He says the party’s primary focus now
is to get its 9,500 registered members more involved by organising into
regional groups to keep the message alive and tap into the next generation of would-be
voters, the 14- to 19-year-olds. Above all, he says, the party needs to clarify
its position: that it’s not a bunch of freeloaders, an image that dogged the
party throughout the campaign.

“The largest problem we had was the party
was not considered a serious party. Most of the people we met considered us to
be some kind of joke. Some thought we had no serious platform, that we just
wanted stuff for free. We believe that this image is beginning to change,” he
says.

The issue winning over the sceptical ones
is the spectre of increased surveillance. “No one wants a surveillance nation
like you have in Britain” he says.

Alluding to the movement’s appeal overseas,
Mr. Lingegard vowed the Piracy Party will remain an active voice in the digital
copyright debate. Perhaps the party’s rhetoric is already sinking in. Starting
with the campaign, some of the more prominent Swedish political candidates have
began to question for the first time publicly whether the criminalisation of
file-sharing ought to be addressed. Whether it’s a political stunt on their
parts to appeal to young voters remains to be seen.

To be sure, whether the Piracy Party will
last to the 2009 European elections is, historically speaking, a long shot.
Political parties formed on a narrow set of issues – lest you forget, the
Piracy Party proudly takes no stance on such hotly debated issues as foreign
policy, the euro, taxation or the environment – often quickly fall out of
favour with the populace.

Even in the aftermath of defeat, the party
is not calling for any radical changes; crucially, it sees no need in adding to
its platform the concerns of let’s call it the analogue world: namely, clean
air, job security and the euro. The Party, says Mr. Lingegard, has attracted
members who were former anarchists, nationalists and communists. “If we were to
appeal more to the general public with these issues, the 9,500 members we have
today would leave.”

In my first conversation with Mr. Lingegard
in June,
I asked him how he would define the party using conventional political labels.
Is the Piracy Party centrist, I asked? Right or left? Could it be libertarian
or even communist? Certainly, elements of each would appeal to a sharing-is-good, keep-government-out
platform. Mr. Lingegard responded there is no –ist that applies to the Piracy Party.

Perhaps that clinched the party’s downfall.
To quote one famous –ist, Vladimir
Ilyich Lenin: “Politics begin where the masses are, not where there are
thousands, but where there are millions. That is where serious politics begin.”

It’s a bitter lesson
learned for this young movement. Filesharers of the world, you are still not
united.

This article originally ran in a June 8, 2006 article in Times Online, back when I was a columnist there. Now that it's lost behind a firewall I've resurrected the original, unedited version here.

By Bernhard Warner

If file-sharing BitTorrent fanatics were to
form a political party what would it stand for? Would it adhere to a left-leaning
platform, prioritising social services? After all, “free” is their mantra. Or,
would it take a page from the political right, arguing for smaller government
and free market ideals? To be sure, your typical downloader’s biggest enemy is
government intervention.

Vast in numbers, highly educated, well
connected, downloaders are a political force. And yet it’s highly unlikely any
of the major political parties in the West would consider taking them under
their wing any time soon. For that reason, some 6,000 Swedes (and counting)
have formed their own political party: The Pirate Party.

To be clear, the Pirate Party doesn’t just
represent all-you-can-eat downloaders, but downloading is the principal
activity this group -- ranging from their teens to late 50s -- seems to have in
common. “For a lot of members this is the first political party they’ve ever
joined,” says 21-year-old Balder Lingegard, an engineering student from
Gothenburg who serves as the Pirate Party secretary and is a Parliamentary
candidate in this September’s national election. “For some, they have felt
betrayed by the political system for a long time, feeling it did not represent
their interests. Others felt as if there was never an important enough issue
for them to take a political stand.”

That “important
issue” occurred last week in the form of a raid by Swedish police on The PirateBay, a community of over 1 million BitTorrent users who
use the popular technology to exchange all manner of files from copyrighted
movies, video games and music to open source software. Not surprisingly, Hollywood
executives and record labels have been trying to shut down the Pirate Bay for
over a year. On May 31, they succeeded – if only briefly.

The uproar from
the take-down triggered something of a rarity in the West: political activism
among the Xbox Generation. An estimated 1,000 youths took to the streets of
Stockholm and Gothenburg on 3 June to protest the raid in rallies hastily
organised by The Pirate Party. While the Pirate Party is not affiliated with
the Pirate Bay, the party has used the controversy to pick up much-needed
support before the national elections three months away. The party tripled
membership in under week, putting it at over 6,000, and the publicity from the
raid is giving the party, formed in January, much needed exposure.

Now, the party is
thinking big. Its goal is nothing short of representation in Parliament,
meaning it will have to capture at least four percent of the popular vote in
September. It intends to put 140 candidates on the ballot vying for the 349
seats in Parliament. To appeal to the estimated 1.5 million active downloaders
in Sweden (a figure, it must be noted, supplied by the Party), the Pirate Party
has been fine-tuning its message to the masses.

“We have three basic pillars to our
political platform: shared culture, free knowledge and a protected private
life,” says Lingegard. That means: 1) suspending copyright protections five
years after the creation of a particular work (shared culture), 2) the
abolition of patents (free knowledge) and 3) enhanced individual privacy that
would seek to eradicate pesky surveillance cameras (protected private life).

The fact that Sweden, a member of the EU
and WTO, is governed by international agreements that would make points 1 and 2
nearly impossible promises to fulfil is of little concern to Lingegard. “Sweden
is regulated by national treaties, we are aware of that. But still, this is a
good place to start,” he says confidently.

But what about foreign policy, for example?
Where does the Pirate Party stand on the war in Iraq or the adoption of the
euro? “Our standpoint is simple: We take no standpoint on those issues,” he
says. Instead, the Pirate Party, if elected, plans to throw all its support
behind the top party as long as they, in turn, support the “shared culture,
free knowledge and a protected private life” platform of the Pirate Party. In
that way, says Lingegard, the Pirate Party will forever escape the convenient
labels of left, right or centrist.

But to regard the Pirate Party members, and
downloaders in general, as opportunists would perhaps be selling short the
movement. Lingegard describes the core Party member as culturally aware,
concerned for the future and technologically sophisticated. They bank online,
shop online and, of course, share online, which would make them, to use traditional
political labels, consumerist and
communist chic.

Perhaps this is what Lingegard means when
he says the political establishment in Sweden just doesn’t understand this
constituency. But name for me an elected official anywhere who understands a voting
bloc that, as Lingegard says, is neither “left, nor centre nor right”. (We can
certainly disqualify any head of state who thinks it’s called “The Internets”).

We may be searching for years for a familiar
–ist that could help define their
politics. But, thanks to Pirate Bay, we can rule out one. They are no longer
isolationists.